beloved

The real beloved is your beginning and end.

When you find that one, 

You'll no longer expect anything else.

Rumi

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Stand Firm

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:

What is this river you want to cross?

There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.

Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.

There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.

There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!

Do you believe there is some place that will make the

soul less thirsty?

In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;

there you have a solid place for your feet.

Think about it carefully!

Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this:  just throw away all thoughts of 

imaginary things, 

and stand firm in that which you are.  

Kabir

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Where we began

Though we are often driven by sorrow,

To seek the end of sorrows,

It is the desire for Love and Love Itself,

That in the end brings us to Freedom.

For when all  hope is lost,

And only Despair remains.

When all paths have failed,

And all efforts proven vain.

Then we sit alone, defeated, with nothing left.

Nothing, that is...

Except what moved us at the onset.

Our Own Shining Heart, our Own Inherent Love.  

We wander for countless ages.

In the heartbreak of giving and receiving,

Until, when grasping is exhausted,

We simply rest as the Love we Are.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Within.

Not in perfection or attainment, 

Not in doing thusly, or understanding profoundly.

Simply Here, where we began.

As we are.

Here.

Now.

Right where we began.

Chuck Surface

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Lying beside my wife

Once when I was awake and lying beside

my wife, she whispered in her sleep, "Hafiz, 

I love you."

I don't think I would trade having heard her

soul speak that way, even for all of heaven

saying the same thing.

But is there a difference?  I think loving is

always God, showing us It is here, as much

as the formless can reach into our world. 

Hafiz

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Go Deeper

Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.
Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.
Let love consume all that is left of you.





Kabir
image via:

http://anateresabarboza.blogspot.ca

waiting

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,

for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

And wait without love.  For love would be love, 

of the wrong thing. 

Yet there is faith.

But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.

And the darkness shall be the light

and the stillness the dancing.

T.S.Eliot

 Photo:  Peter Bowers

  

Anyone Can Sing

Anyone can sing.  You just open your mouth,

and give shape to a sound.  Anyone can sing.

What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,

to initiate a wild and necessary deepening: 

to give the voice broad, sonorous wings

of solitude, grief, and celebration, 

to fill the body with the echoes of voices

lost long ago to bravery, and silence,

to prise the reluctant heart wide open, 

to witness defeat, to suffer contempt, 

to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,

to retreat to the last dark hiding-space

where the tattered remnants of your pride

still gather themselves around your nakedness, 

to know these rags as your only protection

and yet still open -  to face the possibility

that your innermost core may hold nothing at all, 

and to sing from that - to fill the void

with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy

that staves off death yet honours its coming, 

to sing both full and utterly empty, 

alone and conjoined, exiled and at home, 

to sing what people feel most keenly

yet never acknowledge until you sing it. 

Anyone can sing.  Yes.  Anyone can sing.    

William Ayot

Photo:  Peter Bowers